Interpretable learning based Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks for Alzheimer’s Disease analysis

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are widely applied in classification tasks by aggregating the neighborhood information of each sample to output robust node embedding. However, conventional GCN methods do not update the graph during the training process so that their effectiveness is always influenced by the quality of the input graph. Moreover, previous GCN methods lack the interpretability to limit their real applications. In this paper, a novel personalized diagnosis technique is proposed for early Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) diagnosis via coupling interpretable feature learning with dynamic graph learning into the GCN architecture. Specifically, the module of interpretable feature learning selects informative features to provide interpretability for disease diagnosis and abandons redundant features to capture inherent correlation of data points. The module of dynamic graph learning adjusts the neighborhood relationship of every data point to output robust node embedding as well as the correlations of all data points to refine the classifier. The GCN module outputs diagnosis results based on the learned inherent graph structure. All three modules are jointly optimized to perform reliable disease diagnosis at an individual level. Experiments demonstrate that our method outputs competitive diagnosis performance as well as provide interpretability for personalized disease diagnosis.